Hey uh armor sucks

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NeroNoah написал:

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Xarog написал:

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NeroNoah написал:

More bosses should have block penetration.

It should be impossible to block something like the Vaal Smash.

Why on earth would you want to nerf block when your idea would do absolutely nothing against the even more egregious Immortal Call?

Immortal Call will not help if it's not active first.

So? Why's a passive skill that works less effeciently than an active skill more of a problem in a given situation than the active skill?

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CanHasPants написал:

Most importantly, however, what do you mean by synergies? It seems abnormally vague in this application, because to me "not being hit" seems to synergize quite well with additional redundant avoidance mechanics and life regeneration and/or instant life recovery on hits (being an attack speed heavy portion of the tree) Any flat or percent mitigation on top of that would seem to synergize well with "not being hit"^3 as it allows regen/recovery more time to top you off before the next hit slips through, and raises the EHP threshold against one-shots.

AR on the other hand doesn't seem to have this synergy with life recovery as EV does, because AR is still constantly taking elemental damage--that is not a synergy, it's a necessity.

(Sorry if I'm babble-y or unclear, coffee is still brewing ^-^)

That's fine, we're all like that before the morning coffee. Anyway, armor has a pretty straightforward synergy with the unholy trio LC - endurance - arctic armor.

Let's compare, say, a hundred hits for 1000 damage on two chars, both have LC, 5 endurance charges and use arctic armor that prevents 100 points of physical damage.
Also, one char has 5142AR which would give him a 30% reduction on a 1000 damage hit, and the other char has an amount of evasion that would give him 30% chance to evade the hit.

We'll ignore the lightning part of damage, AR build will take 10000 lightning damage assuming max resists and EVA build will take 7000 but there are no synergies there, evader will evade 30% of incoming damage, LC or no LC.

EVA
- you evade 30% of hits
- LC leaves you with 600 physical damage to take
- 5 endurance charges give you 20% physical mitigation
- Out of remaining 480 damage AA absorbs 100 leaving you with 380 per hit
So, you take 70 hits for 380 damage, which is 26600 physical damage taken from those 100 hits for 1K damage

AR
- LC leaves you with 600 physical damage to take
- Armor is compared with 600 damage instead of 1000, bringing it down to 354
- However, endurance charges stack for another 20% mitigation, for a manageable 234 damage
- AA absorbs another 100 leaving you with 134 per hit
So, you take 100 hits for 134 damage, which is 13400 physical damage taken from 100 hits for 1K damage

So... why so little?

If you compare numbers per step, you can see that armor mitigated more damage in the first step because of LC. 5142 armor will mitigate 41% of 600 damage hit instead of 30% when pitted against a 1000 damage hit.

Also, Endurance charges mitigated 33% of pre-endurance damage instead of 20% they did on an evasion build, because they add a set percentage to armor mitigation which is more effective the closer you get to 100% (which is the reason we max our resists at all costs, up there every percentage counts).

And AA, being a flat reduction is much more effective the less damage is left per hit, so it works better when you take 100 weaker hits than 70 stronger ones.

That's how with 30% armor instead of 30% evasion you ended up taking half as much physical damage over the course of same 100 hits. It can get even better than that, potentially making you immune to physical damage below a certain threshold which is something you could never get using evasion and this setup. But the point is synergy, and the fact is, no matter the actual numbers this setup will always work better with equivalent amount of AR than it would with with evasion, the question is only how much better.

I concede your point regarding the effectiveness of AR in this scenario, with one minor complaint: I would think that, to accurately portray the numbers you would need to first compare the equipment (easy, since base AR and EV numbers remain relatively similar), then the passive investment required to reach 5.x k AR; how much EV would an equal investment yield, and what would be the actual chance to evade those one hundred attacks? To simply suggest a 30% chance to evade may require only 2k EV, or more, or more/less passive investment; the actual damage received by EV in this scenario may actually be much closer to AR's 13k received, but that does little to detract from AR's effectiveness in this case.

More to the point, however, I would still prefer EV over AR for the vast majority of other encounters, as (it seems, but I don't know/remember for sure) the majority of physical attacks in game also have an elemental component to them; EV avoids all damage from an attack, elemental included, thus further enhancing your durability versus elemental damage. AR only protects versus the physical component, and to that end we have AA/MoM/EC/IC to compensate for the lack of mitigation on EV's behalf. I'm still fond of the idea of incorporating some portion of AR into the sum effect of our elemental mitigation, for a number of reasons ^-^ At the very least, I don't see much reason "why not?" (e: *) and at the very best I foresee a paradigm shift that creates breathing room to rebalance numerous other things.

*Edit: Besides this (the nature of mitigating phys and elemental damage) being part of AR's and EV's original identity and pro's and con's, but these (specifically) seem little relevant anymore ^-^

Evasion actually has a flatter formula than armor because you get some each level and it improves with dexterity. You would need higher evasion score to reach the same estimated evade values on char screen, but it roughly amounts to the same gear-wise.

The evasion is more favored right now most likely because damage in lategame went up so it takes more effort to mitigate it, also, there are more map mods that counter armor than those that counter evasion. And there we got these nifty auto or semi-auto immortality setups that take care of business in a flash. You just need immortal call to last as long as it takes to clear the screen, which is a few seconds at most.

So yeah, the whole discussion is actually pretty pointless currently. You can make amazing armor tanks, but why would you bother? Utter waste of time.

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CanHasPants написал:

as (it seems, but I don't know/remember for sure) the majority of physical attacks in game also have an elemental component to them; EV avoids all damage from an attack, elemental included, thus further enhancing your durability versus elemental damage.

I doubt that.

It seems to me the minority of "attacks" monsters throw at you have an elemental component, and most of those who actually do have one are not really interesting (as the elemental component vanishes in your 75% resist).

From personal gameplay experience I consider the whole argument of "Evasion lets you dodge elemental attacks as well" argument invalid.

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HiroProtagonist2332 написал:

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PolarisOrbit написал:

I feel the analogy falls apart even without the comparison point of block. The reason is that damage doesn't have a standard measure... which is a consequence of max health not having a constant value.

Here is a counter-analogy:
At level 5, getting hit by a wrecking ball is like 100 damage. At level 50, the wrecking ball is more like 1000 damage. The hit that does 100 damage does the same 100 damage to either character. But to one of them its like a wrecking ball, while the other its like a feathery touch.

Perhaps surprisingly, the amount of damage an attack does doesn't actually represent anything. Therefore there's no such thing as "wrecking ball damage."

The measure of damage you take, in this context, is the armor formula which is a constant. A "wrecking ball" is a hit that exceeds the break point in the armor formula that results in diminishing returns.

"Damage" or a "wrecking ball" is the damage value the mob/mobs hit for, before any consideration of your characters defenses, not what ends up being taken from your health.

I'm struggling to understand how you read my post because your reply borders on nonsense. Perhaps it would help if I mention that my counter-analogy assumed 0 defenses of any kind? So the distinction you made between damage taken and damage dealt is not only meaningless, the way in which you "corrected" me was in fact the way I intended it to be read all along.

I ask: What does an attack that deals 100 damage (before any defenses are applied) actually represent? When you come up with an answer to that, consider how that 100 damage is outright fatal to a novice (~65 health) while barely a scratch to an experienced warrior (~3000 health). Does the thing that you came up with for 100 damage to represent still make sense in both contexts? "100 damage" is a fiction of RPG progression. So how can it represent a wrecking ball?

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Peterlerock написал:

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CanHasPants написал:

as (it seems, but I don't know/remember for sure) the majority of physical attacks in game also have an elemental component to them; EV avoids all damage from an attack, elemental included, thus further enhancing your durability versus elemental damage.

I doubt that.

It seems to me the minority of "attacks" monsters throw at you have an elemental component, and most of those who actually do have one are not really interesting (as the elemental component vanishes in your 75% resist).

From personal gameplay experience I consider the whole argument of "Evasion lets you dodge elemental attacks as well" argument invalid.

You may be right (ergo, parenthetical disclaimer, ftw! ^-^)

Allow me to rephrase: The majority of attacks I noticed in game seemed to contain an elemental component (because it's easy not to notice something non-threatening) or was an ill-timed puncture / an already well known heavy phys hitter. This, it would seem, could be due to the expectation of maintaining 75% res, and content being tuned against that expectation.

From personal experience, EV seemed much more comfortable to me, because I noticed significantly less (but more spikey) damage taken than building with AR; I only assume that has something to do with elemental conversion in attacks (and Acro).

You can rule out the idea of "elemental (component) attacks are significant" by playing a map with the mod "monsters deal 99% extra damage as fire/cold/lightning" and comparing it to a map without such an affix.

Now every attack has an elemental component.

Does it matter? No.

I barely notice any difference in damage taken, because mob damage is very low to begin with, and adding 25% (as you resist 75%) doesn't change that.

Mob elemental damage is a killer in this game. But not on attacks, only on spells.

Those added elemental damage mods are pretty dangerous. While you do resist 75% of it, 25% still gets through. Xandro, Colossal Bone Stalkers, Devourers, Croaking Chimerals, etc. suddenly feel so much more threatening with something like 100% added Cold Damage. The damage becomes spikier unless you are a good tank.

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Peterlerock написал:

Against really seriously big hits, you are supposed to stack another defense on top of it, be it IC, Lightning Coil, Flasks, manual dodging, Block, MoM or whatever.

The problem is that stacking armor is a humongous investment in terms of passive points, items and such; and IC, Lightning Coil/Cloak of Flame, etc, require virtually *no* investment, and completely blow it out of the water.

If I dump half my tree into armor I should be tankier than someone with 0 armor, but these items create a number of cases where the reverse is true. Especially against instant or near-instant spike damage which armor does almost nothing to mitigate in its present state. To get 40% damage reduction against the upper end of endgame phys alpha strikes would take tens of thousands of armor. Reaching that would require total commitment to armor in the passive tree and gear- and would still only protect against physical damage. Or you could put on a cloak of defiance and get 40% mitigation to everything that doesn't suffer diminishing returns against bigger hits, and invest your gear and passive tree into something else.

There's a limited number of ways the situation can be fixed. Each has significant repercussions to the overall game that would require a great deal of work on GGG's part to sort out.

But who knows? Maybe GGG has already solved this problem in the new tree somehow. We'll see.